Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts. Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. In many existing systems, the criteria for servicing the contact from the moment that the contact center becomes aware of the contact until the contact is connected to an agent are customer-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring. Normally in a present-day automatic call distributor (ACD), when the ACD system's controller detects that an agent has become available to handle a contact, the controller identifies all predefined contact-handling queues for the agent (usually in some order of priority) and delivers to the agent the highest-priority oldest contact that matches the agent's highest-priority queue. Generally, the only condition that results in a contact not being delivered to an available agent is that there are no contacts waiting to be handled. This type of contact distribution is generally known as skill-based routing.
Today's contact centers have many ways to tailor a customer's experience based on the customer's history or real-time interactions with a web site or IVR. Contact center agents (or service representatives, used interchangeably in this document) can leverage this information to cross-sell or up-sell a customer at the time of contact. Today's contact centers are also equipped to survey a customer at the end of a contact.
While these capabilities are readily available over the phone or Internet, they are not readily available on premises at a retail site, for example. Businesses that have face-to-face contact with customers, such as a retail store, restaurant, etc. are not able to identify a customer, know the customer history, or determine current needs of the customer as the contact center can.
As an example, a customer could walk in to a local hardware store looking for a particular item. The sales associates may not have a clue that the customer is a frequent purchaser at their store. Also, the associates may not know that that the customer bought a lawn mower last year nor would they know the make and model of the lawn mower, its part numbers, related parts and objects, or whether there are any potential recall issues with the lawn mower. This means that although the customer is receiving face-to-face assistance, he/she is not necessarily being serviced in the most efficient manner.